Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

As someone who sells products to several thousand wedding professionals (mostly photographers) and who has photographed plenty of weddings, here's what I think:

- Instead of a "bulk discount for professionals", you should just sell them a $399 version that they can use to modify each title (looks like it's just a PNG file in the resources anyway).

- I can't see a bride and groom buying this very often–they are already busy and budget-conscious ... but I could see a best man, parent or bridesmaid doing it (assuming they had a macbook available). They often are bringing a laptop for a slideshow anyway, so it could work.

- I think the price might be a little high ... $49 to $79 seems more reasonable to me–especially since I'm still doing all the editing/uploading/sharing work myself afterwards.

- Use wedding blogs to get the word out and offer up some free demos or prizes. There are blogs for fancy weddings, green weddings, DIY weddings, budget weddings, etc.–and they are very popular with brides. It's a good way to get noticed.

- I can probably help you spread the word among some wedding photographers (including some who have well-read blogs). A lot of them are doing video too (as many SLRs now do HD video) so they could easily incorporate these into a DVD. Plus, several are doing photobooths or slideshows at receptions.

I'll blog about it too if you'd like–feel free to get in touch. I could get some photographers using it this weekend and giving you feedback.

I don't own a Mac and I'm married already so might opinion might not matter that much, but if I was getting married, I'd want the videographer to set this up. Somehow I don't feel comfortable buying this kind of a thing for $99, but if a videographer charged me $99 to have a Macbook (better yet an iPad!) at my wedding where people could easily record video messages, I'd feel much better about it. The difference is that it becomes the videographer's problem if something breaks. Otherwise, if I bought it and brought my own computer to set it up I would (a) worry that somebody stole my beloved laptop and (b) something went wrong and nobody is actually able to record the videos. Targeting this at videographers might not bring in as much dough, but it seems to me it would have a higher chance of having satisfied end clients.

This. I was worried about so many other things on my wedding day. The last thing I'd want to fret over was doing tech support for a laptop and piece of video software. Most of my groomsmen were top-notch tech guys and I wouldn't even want them to worry about it. They were there for me, my wife, and our wedding day, not to play help desk tech.

But if this was something our videographer or photographer had offered I would've jumped on it in an instant.

The advantage of having a direct-to-consumer approach is that I can see a market for non-wedding occasions, where there is no official videographer. Baby showers, graduations, retirement parties, it wouldn't surprise me if some people even wanted it for a funeral/memorial. It's a pretty neat idea.

[Edit: just thought of another one - military people posted overseas, I can see people at the family gatherings like Thanksgiving wanting to send individual video greetings]

If hardware were included, I think this would be perfect for the exact reasons you specified. The number of people comfortable enough with computers to deploy something like this for such an important task is vanishingly small when compared to the number of people who would pay a little extra to a videographer to bring a ready-made kiosk unit to the wedding.

I was recently married (this summer) and I can say that I would have loved to have something like this at my wedding. I lugged my laptop and large screen monitor to the wedding and set it up on a side table to display a slide show of me and my (future) wife growing up. It was something that people really got a kick out of.

It’s really not that difficult to haul a laptop to a wedding, there’s so much to setup already it’d be a drop in the bucket. Also, I had one of my best men (they were all best men) in charge of the slideshow, I think another one of them could have been in charge of the video laptop. I think having a MacBook is the major barrier to entry here.

I realize I’m probably slightly more technically savvy than the average groom, but I honestly got excited when I saw this and thought “Man! Where was this when I got married?”

$99 for this is too steep? The average cost of wedding flowers is $700. For flowers!

http://www.costhelper.com/cost/wedding/flowers.html

I think the price is fine for the market he's targeting. Hell, given how irrational people are when it comes to weddings, he might actually sell more if he doubles the price.

Maybe I should have qualified that point with a "in this economy" ... I have a lot of very close friends who are photographers, videographers, florists, etc.–almost every bride is low-balling them and squeezing budgets.

I'm not saying some people won't pay $99 ... I just think its slightly above a "no brainer" price. Also, I don't think this qualifies as a "substitute" for a real (i.e. paper and ink) guestbook–most brides will still want that.

Personally, I think if I were in the situation of selling software to brides I might sell exclusively to brides with a budget in excess of $25,000 and if anyone was unwilling to pay $100 I would wish her the most magical day ever using whatever alternative works for her.

This should be STUPIDLY easy to sell as a subscription service to wedding photographers, incidentally. Three words: incremental marginal revenue. After you've already landed the photography gig you can pitch the lucky lady on the video guestbook "for only $150 more"

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